The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Rhizome is now offering Organizational Subscriptions, group memberships
that can be purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions
allow participants at institutions to access Rhizome's services without
having to purchase individual memberships. For a discounted rate, students
or faculty at universities or visitors to art centers can have access to
Rhizome?s archives of art and text as well as guides and educational tools
to make navigation of this content easy. Rhizome is also offering
subsidized Organizational Subscriptions to qualifying institutions in poor
or excluded communities. Please visit http://rhizome.org/info/org.php for
more information or contact Lauren Cornell at LaurenCornell AT Rhizome.org

We at Rhizome are currently compiling a New Media Arts Syllabi List, which
will be made available to our members in upcoming months. The syllabi will
span from the last ten years, and like the new media art field itself, it
will incorporate a wide range of disciplines (robotics, theory,
comparative literature, musicology, art history, etc.). If you are
interested in contributing your syllabi to this list, please contact me at
ceci AT rhizome.org.

We hope this list will become a valuable and continuing resource for the
teachers and students who represent
a significant part of our member base.

So this has been a rocky but ultimately positive month for Rhizome. :-/
Two major outtages disrupted service and delayed our programs. However, I
used these problems as an opportunity to make Rhizome stronger.
Additionally, some very positive things have happened, including the
launch of a new Advanced Search tool.

Problems detailed below...

=== Disk Error

Early in the morning on March 28th, the Rhizome server crashed with a
severe disk error. While the database and mailing lists were backed up,
we still had to rebuild Rhizome.org on a fresh server. This contributed
to most of our delays, as we rebuilt each service individually. Among the
services that were disrupted were:

On the weekend of April 7th, RAW began receiving a massive flow of email
from the "Mailia" project. These emails overloaded the server and caused
several outages. Unfortunately, this coincided with the time that users
were finalizing their commissions proposals. I unsubscribed the Mailia
project from RAW and blocked email from Mailia to Rhizome.

I have since been in touch with the artist responsible for Mailia. He told
me that Mailia itself was the victim of a mail bomb, and it bounced
messages with a forged "list AT rhizome.org" address back to Rhizome.org. He
has forwarded me examples of the emails that Mailia received and his story
appears credible. Furthermore, the artist has agreed to block any email
from Mailia to the Rhizome lists (raw AT rhizome.org, list AT rhizome.org).

I would like to restore the artist's access, pending these actions:

+ additional investigation of the emails that Mailia received
+ configuration of RAW to prevent a repeat of the mail bomb /outage
situation

It is not in the interest of Rhizome to block or ban users, especially
from RAW. I will have more updates on this situation later.

=== Artbase

There have continued to be problems with artbase submissions. This
service was disrupted when the new site went up in December, and was hit
again when the server went down in late March. The tools have been fixed,
but we still have to catch up with the many submissions that have been
made.

Additionally, I need to review cloned artwork before posting them online.
Due to the issues over the last month I have not had the time to post
uploaded cloned artworks. I shall be focusing my efforts in this
direction.

===== Positive Notes

While we have encountered difficulty this month, we have still
accomplished several important projects:

+ structured Rhizome.org server for planned load balancing
+ fixed several key performance bottlenecks on Rhizome.org website
+ our site traffic is up to a new record, over 5.4 million page views
+ our commissions program received a record 180 exciting submissions
+ launched new Search and Advanced Search tools

=== Commissions

As noted, we received a record number of submissions. The voting phase
has begun:

These tools have an entirely new search back end. Much of this
development had been completed before the server crash in late March. We
went ahead and pushed this out instead of installing the old search.
These tools are still somewhat beta, so please let us know how they work
for you.

===== Summary

With the recent restoration of RARE and launch of new Advanced Search, we
have completed the restoration of Rhizome services. Over the last month,
a number of individuals have contacted us about various issues with
Rhizome. Now that the server is stabilizing, our focus is turning to
these issues and we hope to have them resolved in the coming week(s). I'd
like to take a moment to thank all our members, who have been so patient
during this difficult time.

Purchasing hosting from BroadSpire contributes directly to Rhizome's
fiscal well-being, so think about about the new Bundle pack, or any other
plan, today!

About BroadSpire

BroadSpire is a mid-size commercial web hosting provider. After conducting
a thorough review of the web hosting industry, we selected BroadSpire as
our partner because they offer the right combination of affordable plans
(prices start at $14.95 per month), dependable customer support, and a
full range of services. We have been working with BroadSpire since June
2002, and have been very impressed with the quality of their service.

If you care about which proposals and which art you want to see supported,
please take the time to vote!

I have emailed all the candidates, and asked them:

+ not to participate in list discussion on any of the work under
consideration.
+ not to change their proposal sites during the discussion in an attempt
to win more votes.

For those voting, please pay attention to whether each proposal actually
meets the requirements of the Call For Proposals:

+ these commissions are intended to fund (in whole or in part) new works
or new elaborations of/additions to existing work.
+ these commissions are intended for works that take the internet as their
primary vehicle for production

Finally, note that we are starting the voting 2 weeks later than planned.
This round of voting will last until May 2nd. For more information about
the voting schedule or process, please check:

Reviewing photography and new media with mathematical themes and
inspirations for an exhibition in Fall 2006. This includes all traditional
and digital photography processes, photography-related mixed media, video,
installations, interactive stations, and performance-based work.

Send appropriate documentation on slides, CD, web site links, dvd, or
video; an image list; a statement outlining the mathematical implication
of your work; a resume; any other support material; complete and accurate
contact information; an SASE for return of your materials.

Artists, mathematicians, and others may apply. There is no application fee.

Today, freedom is far from free. Network and hardware access bears often
ignored costs. 'Free and open' at times means 'closed and expensive'.
Freedom can be conceptualised to fit innumerable agendas. Freedom is the
freedom to say no, to withdraw your collaboration, to refuse friendly
cooperation. To be free is to live one's contradictions. But whose freedom
do we praise? There is no solace in the liberty of being employed but
poor, surveilled and uninsured.

For Stewart Brand the central hacker ethos indicates that 'information
wants to be free'. Lessig's Free Culture and Stallman's Free Software mark
the tension between proprietary and open source domains - the battle
between intellectual 'property' and creativity. The flood of civic,
participatory technologies such as the blog contributes to a larger number
of voices being heard. Online, commons-based peer production creates
novel, economic realities that no venture capitalist can kill.

For Yochai Benkler these alternative economies are not fads but real
facts. They are not utopian dreams but lived reality. Sociable Web media
allow for larger individual freedom and the potential to co-create
society. The freedom to remix, to mash up, to reconceptualise,
recontextualise, hybridise, breathes in free cultural formations.
Knowledge repositories like Wikibooks allow for knowledge-on-call, albeit
bringing access which is at times partial and exclusive. Such openly
accessible initiatives out-collaborate even the best-paid Britannica
editors.

Freedom is an inalienable right that has often been overruled in the name
of justice and liberty. Citizens worldwide are armchair passengers on the
nightly news train or watch reality TV shows such as 'Big Brother'. They
dream of their lives as thankfully being 'free'. After all, to be free is
a guaranteed human right, as enshrined by the United Nations in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Captured in this document is the
right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of
expression and opinion; and the right to life, liberty, and security of
person.

This issue of M/C Journal asks a question which intentionally traverses
politics, media, philosophy, techno-studies, and new media art: to what
extent are we, and can we expect to be, free?

The United States' statesman Benjamin Franklin reminds us that 'they that
can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety.' Bertolt Brecht associated a blue sky with
freedom. How much space is there for freedom in spaces of your actions,
thoughts and feelings, online and off? Ubiquitous multinationals sell us
the freedom to customize as privilege of the user. Increasingly, companies
give away things for free. Enticing 'free gifts' must be paid back in the
long run to the Googles and Ebays. We buy into the hierarchies of sharing
and exchange.

Are freedom, independence and autonomy merely illusions in the
participatory panopticon? The potential of being on the loose is the power
to shape civic society while learning to live with hybridity. Which
threats to freedom are we prepared to accept in the pursuit of the
rhetoric of freedom? Can we live with the cruel lie that to preserve
freedom, one must strike pre-emptively?

We invite contributions from theorists, practitioners, and all those who
dare to reclaim the discourse of freedom.

M/C Journal was founded (as "M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture") in
1998 as a place of public intellectualism analysing and critiquing the
meeting of media and culture. Contributors are directed to past issues of
M/C Journal for examples of style and content, and to the submissions page
for comprehensive article submission guidelines. M/C Journal articles are
blind peer-reviewed.

The Rhizome Commissions Program is made possible by support from the
Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the
Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and
the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support has
been provided by members of the Rhizome community.

*It is important that you also send us a file that is big enough for
display (up to 10megabytes by email) by the 8 July deadline.

*Also send a DVD with your work by 22July (this will ensure high quality
resolution for projection)

* see shipping address below

---Interactive Works (Flash, Director, MaxMSP/Jitter)
Interactive works can be "recorded" and uploaded up to 10megabytes.
Interactive works must have an additional auto-run mode.

Information:
*All submitted work must be able to run locally (on a hard drive) in a
web browser such as Netscape or Firefox. Please submit by sending an
email to poppingpixels AT gmail.com with an attachment or web link to your work.

*Attach a brief artist statement and a description of your work (up to 1
page) as a word document. Texts accepted in English, Espanol, Francais.

*Copyright Info: All artists accepted for this exhibition will retain
ownership of copyright and all other rights to their artwork. We retain
the right to use images of accepted artwork for promotional reasons
concerning the exhibition or future projects.

*Multiple submissions are accepted and encouraged!

*All participating artists will have their work added to the Popping
Pixels site.
www.poppingpixels.org
(Last year's exhibition: New Haven, CT, US- Coordinated by artists
Cynthia Beth Rubin and Colleen Tully)

*Artists interested in selling your work, please specify with your
submission. We will have a list and will connect you with the interested
buyer. We will NOT handle sales directly!

*********Digital Photographers- this will not be a photography exhibition,
but if you've made any remarkable slideshows, videos from stills, or have
made your images interactive, please submit!

ISEA2006 is taking place in San Jose, California, August 7-13. Seehttp://01sj.org for more information about the Symposium and related
ZeroOne San Jose Festival.

Beginning Monday, April 24th, ISEA2006 will host a month long series of
discussions on the accepted paper abstracts for each of the Symposium
themes: Interactive City, Community Domain, Pacific Rim and
Transvergence. See http://01sj.org/content/blogcategory/138/147/ for an
overview.

An important objective to ISEA2006 is enabling conversation and discourse
between audience(s) and presenters. Toward that objective this years ISEA
incorporates a single main track of presentations + artists presentations
combined with a pre-publishing model. The reading of papers is not
permitted. Instead authors will present their abstracts in the on-line
Forum and then pre-publish full manuscripts weeks prior to the Symposium.
The goal is to inform and influence both authors and audiences as well as
create conversational relationships and provide for advanced consideration
of topics to be presented at the Symposium. At ISEA2006 each theme will
have two extended ?conversational? sessions in which several authors
present summaries of their papers followed by a moderated conversation and
audience interaction.

An important role in the Symposium and Forum is that of the Moderator. We
have invited a group of prestigious Moderators who will facilitation of
individual sessions of the Online Forum and Symposium.

The ISEA2006 Papers Forum, April 24nd to May 22nd begins with Interactive
City. Beginning with Interactive City, abstracts for each of the Symposium
themes will be presented in a series of open public discussions.

The 2006 edition of the internationally renowned ISEA Symposium will be
held August 7-13, 2006, in San Jose, California in conjunction with the
inauguration of ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, a
milestone festival to be held biennially.

What tactics, issues and conceptual practices expose or inform the
distinctions of these subject terrains relating to contemporary art
practice? What analyses illuminate art practice engaged with new technical
and conceptual forms, functions and disciplines; provide for innovative
tactical implementations of cultural production involving urbanity,
mobility, community and locality; examine the roles and responsibilities
of corporations, civic and cultural organizations, discuss strategic and
economic planning as it relates to creative community; serve to expose new
portals of production and experience; provide for interpretive bridges
between cultures and identities; and provide for provocative examination
of contemporary political and economic conditions? How is new media art
practice re-shaping the world?

The ISEA2006 Symposium is an international platform for artists, cultural
producers, media theorists, curators and the general public to share the
latest ideas and practices involving new media. Enabling discourse across
disciplines, ideologies and philosophical frameworks is an important
objective as is the facilitation of discussion and conversation. Audience
participation is facilitated through expanded moderated sessions, an
afternoon Poster Session/Reception and through an on-line forum featuring
the pre-published abstracts and papers.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

8.

From: Neural <a.ludovico AT neural.it>
Date: Apr 26, 2006
Subject: The Work of Media Art in The Age of Digital Reproduction

A two-day symposium surveying current projects concerned with preserving
the history of media art and initiatives aimed at
stimulating practices, networks, critical appreciation and knowledge
associated with electronic and digital media arts.

Day 1 will provide a 'guided tour' of video art through the early
exponents of analogue and film formats and re-examine their place within
the contemporary art gallery and museum. This will be interspersed with
artists' presentations that help explore the nature and practice of the
moving image and its current conditions within the 'visual arts "scene"'.
The main drive will be to re-examine the critical frameworks between
current practice and its antecedents.

Day 2 will involve presentations by members of Mag.Net (Magazine Network
of Electronic Cultural Publishers), and will explore print and electronic
publications as a mean of supporting new practices and networks around
digital culture. Each contributor will present their editorial positions,
an overview of practice in their countries, as well as present for pubic
discussion some of the debates Mag.Net is interested in - social and
virtual networking, developing flexible forms of translocal and transmedia
exchange, and the new possibilities available to artists and publishers,
such as POD (Publishing on Demand).

Curated by interdisciplinary artist duo LoVid, Flipped Chips includes
single channel videos as well as presentations by artists from around the
world who custom make their own hardware video instruments.

Dan Sandin, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Matthew Schlanger,
Steve Beck, Jim Wiseman, and Bill Etra represent a generation of pioneers
who explored video and moving image synthesis. These artists developed
hardware instruments as technological advancements in an era of idealism
and utopian views of communication, where video and television were
regarded as the ultimate new creative medium, able to elicit widespread
cultural and social change.

Tonight their work will be shown alongside that of a new generation of
artists returning to hardware-based video instruments, like Billy Roisz
(NTSC), noteNdo, Jon Satrom, Paul Slocum, Karl Klomp, Cory Arcangel and
Paper Rad, and LoVid. Departing from their predecessors, the latter set
approaches technology with personal and global nostalgia as well as a
romantic infatuation with the media-generating object. Inspired by noise,
extreme music, glitch and hacker culture, as well as the fragility,
unpredictability, and limitations of technology, they choose to work with
decades-old electronic components for personal aesthetic reasons and as a
reaction to the dominance of technology and media in mainstream culture.

Ocularis is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that provides a forum
for the exhibition of independent, experimental and documentary film/video
and new media, as well as international and repertory cinema. Established
in 1996 as a rooftop film series catering to local audiences in North
Brooklyn, it has since evolved into a weekly cinema, a producer of
collaborative film/video work and a summer open-air screening series.

curated by Emma Lewis
In association with Trampoline and Ginza Art Laboratory
www.trampoline.org.uk

Call for Submissions

Deadline 31st May

We constantly swim through an invisible sea of hidden reality ? our
environment is not formed only by our physical surroundings but of its
multiplicity of insubstantial networks ? constantly transmitting and
receiving.
Physical geography is being transcended, psycho-geography is extended.
We are never located in just one space.
Here is not just here but also there.

?Dislocate? is an exhibition examining the tensions between the local and
the global ? the elements and identity of one local space which are
simultaneously intersected by countless global links and influences.

In its indefatigable attempt to promote new media art to the world
Trampoline ? platform for new media art - is going to Tokyo this summer
and is seeking submissions of works which engage with notions of multiple
spaces and presence, the ubiquity of new media and the challenge to our
sense of place.

We are particularly encouraging the submission of video work some of which
will be shown on a showreel, others on single monitors. But we also
welcome submissions for web streaming, computer based works and sound
works. Work should engage with the theme of the exhibition on some level
and proposals should outline how this connection is made.

In addition to this there is one project as part of the exhibition which
the curator invites you to consider submitting to:

Audio Tour
In joining one space with another and exaggerating a sense of dislocation,
the curator is keen to merge other cities with Tokyo in the form of an
audio tour, touring one city within another. It is imagined that this
audio tour would be worn by visitors to the exhibition and would instruct
them on a small walking tour around the city, but as they are walking
through the streets of Tokyo they will be listening to a tour of another
city.
The curator is keen to work with artists interested in audio guides and
would like to develop a bilingual audio guide of another city which could
then be presented in the area surrounding the gallery in Ginza, Tokyo,
referencing one space within another.

If you have any ideas which you would like to develop further in relation
to this project and in dialogue with Trampoline we would very much like to
hear from you.

Hello. I wanted to let you know about an exhibition in San Francisco,
which is collaboratively presented by Rhizome and Rx Gallery. Below is the
text of today's Rhizome News piece, announcing The GIF Show. I'm excited
to say that the show features a combination of very active artists and a
few exceptionally talented artists for whom this is their first
exhibition.

I hope that some of you can attend the opening (which will feature live
music & visuals by Eats Tapes & Nate Boyce!), but if not perhaps you'll
help us spread the word by becoming Myspace friends with the exhibit! :)

Best regards,
Marisa

The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco's Rx
Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call 'GIF Luv,' a recent
frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs
(Graphic Interchange Format files). Curated by Marisa Olson in a West
Coast Rhizome collaboration with Rx, the show presents GIFs and GIF-based
videos, prints, readymades, and sculptures by a range of artists,
including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia
Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul
Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). GIFs have a rich
cultural life on the internet and each bears specific stylistic markers.
>From Myspace graphics to advertising images to porn banners, and beyond,
GIFs overcome resolution and bandwidth challenges in their pervasive
population of the net. Animated GIFs, in particular, have evolved from a
largely cinematic, cell-based form of art practice, and have more recently
been incorporated in music videos and employed as stimulating narrative
devices on blogs. From the flashy to the minimal, the sonic to the silent,
the artists in The GIF Show demonstrate the diversity of forms to be found
in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these
image files. The opening is sure to be just as lively, with music by Eats
Tapes and visuals by Nate Boyce. Spread the luv! - Rhizome.org

So on the heels of the recent ArtBase discussions on RAW, I'd like to open
up the metadata conversation.

As some of you know, Rhizome's metadata, by which I mean the vocabularies
and descriptive terms that index the content in our archives, was
introduced when the ArtBase was founded in 1999. Since that time, the
field of new media art has grown and changed dramatically, and we believe
the metadata needs to reflect these developments. This conversation will
involve a consideration of controlled vocabularies and folksonomies, and
can also fold back onto issues recently discussed such as making the
ArtBase a repository for code, as Pall Thayer and Rob Myers suggested.
It is also an opportunity for Rhizome to collaborate with other
professionals and organizations committed to digital preservation.

We would like to collectively address the metadata via RAW to get feedback
and insight from the Rhizome community. After this discussion, Rhizome
staff will have a wrap-up conversation with leading preservation scholars
including Michael Katchen from Franklin Furnace, Alain Depocas from the
DOCAM project at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Dr. Sarah Cook co-founder
of the list Crumb (www.crumbweb.org), Kenneth Schlesinger of the
Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP), Caitlin Jones of the Variable
Media Initiative (with the Guggenheim Museum) and now Director of
Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, and Rick Rinehart, Director of
Digital Media at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In
this wrap-up conversation, we will synthesize the community discussion and
finalize a strategy and process for Rhizome to move ahead. Our challenge
is to come up with a set of changes that serve the interests of the
artists as well as the wide audience that interacts with the ArtBase while
keeping Rhizome¹s resources (technical, staff) and systems (membership) in
mind.

The ArtBase is a singular and highly valuable project. It's also a complex
and ongoing problem, one that opens up exciting questions in regards to
the preservation and presentation of digital art. As we move towards a
celebration of our tenth anniversary, we want to make improvements to this
valuable resource a priority.

Now, I'd like to introduce Rick Rinehart who will moderate this discussion
with Marisa and I. If you don't know Rick, he's worked extensively with
digital preservation through his Archiving the Avant-Garde project and the
Variable Media Initiative. He also helped design Rhizome's metadata, and
wrote a key document entitled 'A Report on Preserving the ArtBase' which
can be read here: http://rhizome.org/artbase/report.htm - All that said,
Rick is very familiar with the ArtBase and with different systems of
metadata. I'm happy to have him involved, and I'm looking forward to this
discussion.

Best, Lauren

+Richard Rinehart added:+

Hello Rhizomes,

I'm writing to follow up on Lauren's email about the Rhizome ArtBase and
to kick off a conversation about the language we use to describe works in
the ArtBase.

There are different types of metadata relevant to works in the ArtBase and
some are fairly straightforward such as Creators, Dates, and Titles. But
the type of metadata that is most problematic and at the same time most
community-driven is descriptive metadata such as Type, Genre, and
Keywords. The data-values used to fill out those metadata are terms taken
from vocabularies (the lists of different types, genres, etc.) If you have
ever submitted a work to the ArtBase, you know what these look like: Types
include animation-art, audio-art, etc.; Genres include abstract-art,
allegory-art, etc; and Keywords include access, animation, archive, etc.
(a full list of Rhizome's data-values/vocabularies follows below).

Rhizome would like to update the vocabularies it uses for this descriptive
metadata. Rhizome has cited three reasons for changing; the vocabularies
are incomplete, the vocabularies are however key as they are how visitors
search the vast Rhizome site, and lastly, but not least, there is no canon
or authoritative source for terms related to digital art, so Rhizome can
take this practical need and turn it into an opportunity to engage a
community discussion about vocabularies and to set an example for others
to follow. All metadata specific to one discipline, but especially
vocabularies, need to arise from the community's practice and not be
imposed from outside or the descriptions and the artifacts being described
will never quite match up. It is also important to collaborate and
coordinate with other groups working on digital art metadata and
preservation, so that's another reason to have this conversation on RAW
and why Rhizome will also be convening people from the Variable Media,
Archiving the Avant Garde, and Canadian DOCAM projects to discuss this as
well.

Some questions and considerations that might get the conversation started:

1) Do Rhizome's vocabularies need to be compatible with other metadata
standards? If so, which, and how much?

Thoughts: Many other disciplines and communities use what they call
"controlled" vocabularies or authoritative thesauri. For instance the art
world has used the Getty's Art and Architecture Thesaurus for years
(http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/aat/).
Systems are then built using these vocab standards. If Rhizome were in
some way compatible with these standards, then new search engines could
search across distributed art resources online from Getty databases to
Rhizome's ArtBase ensuring that digital art is not "ghettoized" because of
incompatible languages. Interoperability is important in a semantic as
well as technical sense, but luckily compatibility does not necessarily
require that one adopt the "authoritative" vocabulary completely, or
exclusively.

2) What can we propose here that Rhizome can practically accomplish given
limited resources?

The larger cultural world is cursed with a plethora of metadata
"standards" and vocabularies that are so complex that no one can afford to
implement them and thus they go unused and interoperability remains a
theoretical concept. We should be smarter than that. A simple system that
works and can be realistically maintained is worth more than a complex
solution that never happens.

3) Currently the metadata that uses vocabularies is divided into type,
genre, and keywords -- are these categories sufficient? Should we add
others?

Thoughts: Many other disciplines and communities use metadata categories
similar to this. For instance, in various art-world/museum metadata
standards they use Genre to indicate a broad category ("painting"), then
Type to indicate a format within the Genre ("watercolor"), and then
Subject (keywords) to indicate "intellectual access points" ("landscape")
that people will search on to find the record.

4) Do we want to enhance/ elaborate/ add on to our existing descriptive
terms or keep the current controlled vocab as is, and make folksonomy also
an option?

Thoughts: Can one use folksonomies or other dynamic systems to keep a
vocabulary fresh yet still retain some level of compatibility with other
standards?

5) who is the artbase for? Who is its audience, and how does that affect
our re-design of the metadata.

Thoughts: Related to this is the question of what the long-term use of the
ArtBase should or will be and how can we support that with better
vocabularies?

So, let the games begin! What do you think?

Richard Rinehart

----------------------------
Rhizome ArtBase Vocabularies

TYPE
The type field describes the abstract media type of the art object.

-Animation-art work in which motion graphics play a significant role
-Audio-art work has strong audio component
-Game-art work is a game or involves gaming in significant ways
-Installation-art object documents a physical installation
-Performance-art object documents a performative art work
-Software-art work is an executable program or involves original
stand-alone software
-Video-art object uses Quicktime, RealVideo, or other time-based video
-Virtual-art work creates a 3D, immersive or otherwise virtual world
-Visual-art work is particularly graphical or especially visual in nature
-Text-art work is ASCII or otherwise text-based

GENRE
The genre field describes the general category of your art object defined
through style, form, or content.

-Abstract-art object is visually abstract
-Allegory-art object uses allegory or metaphor
-Anti-art-art object overtly rejects artistic conventions or codes
-Collaborative-art object was created by more than one person
-Collider-art object dynamically combines material from various sources
-Conceptual-art object is driven primarily by ideas
-Contextual-art object is site-specific, or requires a specific situation
to function
-Database-art object incorporates databases or archives
-Documentary-art object uses found material as evidence; art object
records events for posterity; art object uses documentary data
-Event-art object is/was an event such as a performance or netcast
-Formalist-art object is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of form
-Generative-art object is created afresh for each viewing according to
certain contingent factors
-Historical-art object is about the recording or revealing of past events
-Homepage-art object is (or resembles) a personal website
-Information map-art object is about the visual display of statistical or
other quantitative information
-Narrative-art object tells a story
-Offline-art object has a major offline component
-Participatory-art object requires input from users
-Readymade-art object involves found material not originally meant to be art
-Tactical-art object is example of tactical media; art object is
resistive, political or otherwise confrontational
-Telematic-art object uses distance communication, or allows for remote
manipulation of objects

Through the collective mind of a wealth of taggers, you can craft
algorithms that can acknowledge all variants of the same tag (ie. net-art
versus internet-art) and also allow for unique implementations as seen in
Flickr's Interestingness.http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/

>
> 2) What can we propose here that Rhizome can practically accomplish
> given limited resources?

Tagging resources are readily available on an open source level at
multiple places. One notably is FreeTag: http://getluky.net/freetag/
which is used, I believe, with Upcoming.org. Also crafting a homegrown
tagging schema is also pretty straightforward.

> 3) Currently the metadata that uses vocabularies is divided into type,
> genre, and keywords -- are these categories sufficient? Should we add
> others?

Under the guise of the general tagging approach, I think the 'categories',
'genre', and 'keywords' all become redundant. All pieces should be
categorized by a collection of tags (maybe under the simple label of
"category").

> 4) Do we want to enhance/ elaborate/ add on to our existing descriptive
> terms or keep the current controlled vocab as is, and make folksonomy also
> an option?

I think keeping with the folksonomy approach would be ideal. The most
daunting task of submitting a piece to the Artbase is the fact that you
have to go through a series of check boxes to try and adequately describe
you piece. The folksonomy approach of just describing the piece via
general terms is ideal.

> 5) who is the artbase for? Who is its audience, and how does that affect
> our re-design of the metadata.

With the folksonomy approach, you can easy provide multiple tools for
people who are simply browsing the Artbase. For submitters it'll greatly
simplify their submission process. But what needs to exist would the
ability for them to update their tags and to tag other pieces -- currently
the Artbase doesn't even let you edit your pieces.

My two cents.

+Richard Rinehart replied:+

Thanks David, Rob,

Folksonomies are of course interesting and appropriate, but exclusively?
Also, are there any existing folksonomies that Rhizome could build upon,
or would either of you suggest starting from scratch?

I'm curious about the statement you made below Rob, that any folksonomy
can be made compatible with standards using a good thesaurus. Do you have
an example of this? Whether or not one goes with standards, folksonomies,
or a hybrid model, knowing how to map between them would be terrific.
Although, if one did use a hybrid model, then that would itself create the
mapping (each work would have both standardized terms and folksonomic
terms applied, so averaging among many works, you'd be able to tell what
terms mapped to each other.

Your note on the AAT is very (VERY) well taken. Yes, the AAT is not yet a
good resource for terms for new media art, yet it is the single standard
used most by museums and other organizations collecting new media art. So,
one strategy would be to ignore the AAT as irrelevant; but another might
be to work with the Getty to update and improve the AAT with relevant
terms so that (digital) community-specific practice becomes (museum)
community specific practice rather than creating a ghetto (though I'm not
sure which is the ghetto of the other here :) In the past, the Getty unit
that had maintained the AAT had expressed interest in updating the AAT
based on feedback from the relevant community (us).

+Ryan Griffis replied:+

> 1) Do Rhizome's vocabularies need to be compatible with other metadata
> standards? If so, which, and how much?

i would think a multi-tiered system would address a lot of Rob and other's
(myself included) preference for folksonomic methods. having worked in
situations where a more cohesive standard was needed, i also understand
the function of a hierarchal meta-data system. this gets at the question
of audiences as well. for many uses, a folksonomy system works great, but
for others it's not the ideal. translations of those systems into multiple
languages, for example can be very problematic in the most standardized of
systems.

in terms of the artbase, i would think that a folksonomic system works
well for "keywords" (just like the tagging process already described)
while the classification of "type" "genre" - i would add some other
standards for "technology" and some contextual options for "geography" or
something - could be something linked up to larger needs, whether it's the
Getty or whatever.

the hierarchal system however, seems like it would need to be managed
based on a coherent and consistent, yet easily applied, set of rules, so
that artists aren't subscribing a "type" (for example) that's only based
on some idiosyncratic interpretation of "net.art" or "web art" thus
foiling the purpose of standardization. i guess i'm saying that those
properties of artbase works could/should be managed by some collective,
responsible party (someone at Rhizome or a set of volunteers) rather than
by the artists. let the artists/"localized" community deal with the
folksonomy and tagging. the community tagging process (letting others
attach keywords of relevance i.e. del.icio.us) could also be very useful
here.

i guess as an artist and someone who's had to go through lots of archives,
i'm more invested as an artist in the keywords (the "intellectual access
points") than the definitions of "type" or "genre" - i'm sure that for
conservators however, notions of type, technology, etc are pretty crucial.

just my $0.02, but thanks for including us all in the discussion.

+Richard Rinehart replied:+

Thanks Ryan,

You also brought up something I neglected to mention (I thought my email
too long already :) and that is vocabularies for "technology". I'm just
thinking out-loud that this might be the easiest metadata to populate with
vocab terms, because can't we just use MIME types for this? Right now I
think all the Rhizome "tech" terms are software rather than hardware
based, so it seems we could just solve that little nugget by adopting a
well-known and used existing standard, no?

+Pall Thayer replied:+

I just want to remind everyone that the original idea behind my
proposition of extending the ArtBase to accept open-sourced code for
projects was a way to bring 'preservation' back into the ArtBase which is
being used more often to link to projects than to clone them. So if a
project is based on a server-specific setup in a way that it can't be
cloned and remain functional, cloning of the source- code would still
provide an element of preservation in the ArtBase.

+Richard Rinehart replied:+

Pall,

Good idea. Did you go into how you'd get the source code for proprietary
software? Or how the legal issues might work out in doing that? I'd be
curious to know. Source code is really, REALLY, nice to have for
preservation purposes; I agree.

+Pall Thayer replied:+

Hi Richard,
The suggestion generated a bit of discussion and the thread is
available here:

The suggestion was just for open-sourced code and didn't address
proprietary software at all. The idea is that if the need or desire arises
to reconstruct the work when technology has changed then the
reconstruction could be based on the functionality of the original code
rather than being based on some vague memories and screenshots.

+rob AT robmyers.org replied:+

Quoting Richard Rinehart <rinehart AT berkeley.edu>:

> I'm curious about the statement you made below Rob, that any
> folksonomy can be made compatible with standards using a good
> thesaurus. Do you have an example of this?

I don't have an example I'm afraid. It's more a strategy I had in mind for
paintr (http://paintr.robmyers.org/). Folksonomies and taxonomies are both
formalisations of human language, so if my RDF doesn't contain the word
"blue" but it does contain the word "color" I can locate my tag in the RDF
using wordnet or a thesaurus.

> Your note on the AAT is very (VERY) well taken. Yes, the AAT is not
> yet a good resource for terms for new media art, yet it is the single
> standard used most by museums and other organizations collecting new
> media art. So, one strategy would be to ignore the AAT as irrelevant;
> but another might be to work with the Getty to update and improve the
> AAT with relevant terms so that (digital) community-specific practice
> becomes (museum) community specific practice rather than creating a
> ghetto (though I'm not sure which is the ghetto of the other here :)
> In the past, the Getty unit that had maintained the AAT had expressed
> interest in updating the AAT based on feedback from the relevant
> community (us).

Yes I think that might be a very good project.

Possibly collaborating to make AAT net.art aware and having a process to
add more terms relatively quickly as they come up? So in artbase have a
list of terms you can choose followed by an "other" checkbox that people
could add terms they felt weren't in the taxonomy. We (the Rhizome
community) could then keep an eye on those and see if they should go into
AAT.

A folksonomy might be more democratic & easier to implement though. :-)

On the subject of proprietary software it might be an idea for Rhizome to
get licenses for Windows, ASP, IIS and so on so that software
unfortunately written for them can still be run in the future. In a few
years time having this stuff available for galleries to hire might
actually provide a revenue stream. ;-)

+Sal Randolph replied:+

I second rob & david's arguments about why folksonomies are great, and I
think they would mix amazingly well with rhizome membership (all members
would get to tag the artbase as they like). tag cloud of the artbase
indeed!! It would naturally evolve as the field of inquiry evolves. Also
as someone who has implemented a tagging system with freetag recently,
it's *really* easy to do (freetag is php, and I know rhizome's using ruby,
but it doesn't look all that hard to write one either, just from surveying
the code).

Personally I would advocate for a double system, as some have done: free
folksonomy tagging by everyone, and then a layer of curated language for
either genre or keyword. multiple points of intellectual access are a
good thing.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Rhizome.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of the
New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard
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Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the
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Rhizome Digest is filtered by Marisa Olson (marisa AT rhizome.org). ISSN:
1525-9110. Volume 11, number 16. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org
are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art
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